This is Where the Bad Librarians Go

[lb_lee]

You know I have reached Ultimate Citation when I find myself having to use THIS as my short cite: (Hoffman, 2015, Pg. 484, footnote 235fuckin0). (emphasis mine)

The full citation is: Hoffman, David H. (2015). REPORT TO THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS OF THE AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION INDEPENDENT REVIEW RELATING TO APA ETHICS GUIDELINES, NATIONAL SECURITY INTERROGATIONS, AND TORTURE. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/independent-review/revised-report.pdf

My footnotes reference other people's footnotes and we all fall together in an eternal void made entirely of citations, screaming at each other in capslock.

Comments

[writerkit]

And suddenly my anticipation is much sharpened, having read Loftus's book in college but not gone on to read much else about her-- I get the sense, from other things you've written, that while I did some reading on recovered memories in college, there was a *lot* left out.

[lb_lee]

Which book? Loftus has done multiple books, IIRC. (For me it was Witness for the Defense.)

And it's frustrating, because... because as far as I understand and remember (and it's been a while, and I haven't dug THAT deep into her, so shaker of salt), like, she's not WRONG, exactly. False memories are a thing. False memories can be generated in ways she describes. The things she says about memory's fallibility, AFAIK, aren't WRONG. It's just a lot of complex crap AROUND all of it; I haven't even managed to dig in that deeply into what the ethics investigation for her was ABOUT, other than patient ethics, because it got crib deathed and seems to involve power struggles within the APA and becomes its own rabbit hole, and I'm trying to AVOID going to deep into what's happening for this quick'n'dirty plural history thing.

Like, trying to dig into ANY of the complaints around the big therapists or psychologists opens bottomless cans of worms with a lot of weeding to do. I'm just glad Ralph Allison did me the favor of admitting to being a religious crank from the get-go, making him EASY. Everyone else, it's like, conflicting lawsuits, and convenient resignations that may or may not have been firings in disguise, and it's just awful. One day, I really do want to dig into Colin Ross's deal, but the rabbit hole is SO DEEP and SO DARK and requires so much intestinal fortitude... *shudder*

So yeah. Maybe someone else will crop up here in the comments with the better 411 on all that. (Because on this blog, there MUST be someone who knows more about me than this, maybe polyfrazzlemented or lithophiles)

--Rogan

[writerkit]

I think it might have been "The Myth of Repressed Memory", but I was reading this stuff recreationally and not for class, so I don't actually remember for sure. My chosen rabbit hole is fairly broad and covers a lot of "power struggles in the APA" ground, so I'll probably encounter her again at some point if there were elements of that to it.

I bring... information about terrible people? Sorry.

[lithophiles]

As it happens, I was reading about the ethics investigation a little while ago!

Elizabeth Loftus' deal, as we understand it, was that she resigned from the APA while there was an ethics complaint pending against her so that they couldn't kick her out. Kind of the classic "you can't fire me, I quit!" thing, except it was to keep her record looking clean, because the nature of the ethics complaint was... gross. It involved a 16-year-old girl who was amnesiac of physical and sexual abuse committed against her when she was a child, which was a matter of medical record and had actually been proven by a videotape, and she apparently couldn't recall the abuse at all until she viewed the videotape as a teenager.

Elizabeth Loftus independently set out to contact the mother, who was the perpetrator of most of the physical abuse, located her and told her what was going on, and used this to write an article called "Who Abused Jane Doe?" in which she argued that it was possible that "someone else" had committed the abuse. She left out the very salient fact that she was in communication with the mother, who was, of course, denying the abuse. (She also, at that point, knew the legal name of "Jane Doe" from talking to her mother. Which she was not supposed to. Because as a minor, her privacy was supposed to be protected.) When she got caught, she claimed that she was simply trying to reunite "Jane Doe" with her mother, because her mother had supposedly gotten very emotional at the idea of getting to be in contact with her daughter again. (She had been removed from her family's custody after the videotape proved the abuse.) Well, yeah, that's how abusers work. They pull out the waterworks and denial, and maybe on some level really do love the child, but that doesn't erase the level on which they couldn't stop themselves from abusing again. So, yeah, it was a shitshow, and it says a lot about Loftus that she, like most of the FMSF folks, so readily believed the theatrics of abusers.

And yeah, we've personally gotten annoyed with multiples (and therapists) who flip the narrative to the point where they believe everything reported as a memory, because some of it just clearly is not possible. Our personal experience involved intrusive memories that would periodically flash into our head during late childhood and adolescence and we would freak out, telling ourselves they were just memories of dreams or hallucinations, so we probably lost a lot of detail along the way before we finally started to deal with them. But it also involved a New Agey friend we met in our late teens who convinced us, for a while, that we had lived past lives with her and could remember them if we really wanted to, and got us really believing her for a while (we were sort of thinking "nothing else seems to be fixing my problems, so maybe this could be legit?") Her stories got more and more unbelievable, though, going from relatively mundane stories of life in ancient Ireland, to secret cabals of magicians who could summon familiars (it was also one of those "we are the psychic warriors who must constantly fight evil spirits" types of friendships), and we hit a point where we couldn't believe any of it any more.

It did give us insight, though, I have to say, into how false memories can be formed through suggestion and invoking altered states of consciousness and, more importantly, what's required to maintain belief in them long-term and suppress internal doubt. It's not so simple as suggesting that someone might once have been lost in a mall as a child.

-Amaranth

[lb_lee]

Yeah, even reading The Myth Of Repressed Memory would require an obscene amount of heartblood. I haven't the stamina, and while I hate that about myself, it is what it is right now.

Re: I bring... information about terrible people? Sorry.

[lb_lee]

I KNEW I COULD COUNT ON YOU.

And oh God that's so much worse than I realized, aaaaaaah. And makes me even angrier about it.

It did give us insight, though, I have to say, into how false memories can be formed through suggestion and invoking altered states of consciousness and, more importantly, what's required to maintain belief in them long-term and suppress internal doubt.<\em>

Also are super interested in more on this, if you want to discuss it!

Rogan/Mori

Re: I bring... information about terrible people? Sorry.

[writerkit]

Well, that's definitely a lot, and "we stop investigating the ethics complaint once you leave even if you were a member when you committed the thing" seems like a pretty big loophole. (And now, in googling all this, I've found the revised Hoffman Report, so you've given me some new reading to chase.)

Re: I bring... information about terrible people? Sorry.

[lb_lee]

IIRC, that loophole was closed specifically due to the Loftus thing. So at least it hopefully can't be used again? But yeah, what a trainwreck.